Swords v. Cthulhu

by Jesse Bullington

  The fear was unmanning Archer, making him whine like a child. Bell had seen suchlike before from men under fire or frighted by oncoming pike and sword. That a man usually as bloodless as Archer should find such bane in a pit in the ground was passing strange.

  “This hole, you’ll be talking about the one that opened up under the tunnel we made, is that it?”

  Bell’s measured tone seemed to reassure Archer. He fell silent for some moments, recovering his wits. Then he said, “It’s old, in there. The air even. It didn’t smell bad. Just old. Old as Noah.”

  Bell considered; it was no secret that the city had a Roman history. Why, hadn’t Constantine, the first Christian emperor himself, gained his laurels there? It was not beyond belief that the sappers had found some ancient Roman cellar in their excavations. Bell’s men were countrymen by and large, and prone to a countryman’s fancies. He may have cowed them with his disgust at the very mention of the supernatural, but that didn’t mean they’d stopped believing in it.

  Bell could now imagine the sequence of events, from the discovery of the old cellar or whatever it was, through the excitation of the men’s imaginations, and so to the womanish hysteria. He had some experience in dealing with such nonsense, and as soon as the surgeon came to tend to Archer, he would shame the men back into work by showing them what a gaggle of fools they were.

  The sappers were at first blush surprised and then mutinous about returning to the hole to clear it. Bell was an old hand at commanding men who did not seek contact with the foe with enthusiasm, however, and had already settled on the strategy to use. First, he almost offhandedly mentioned how important fixing the breach was to My Lord Fairfax, who was popular with the troops. He leavened this statement of regret with a passing reference to mutiny and what happened to mutineers in that happy time.

  Leaving the men’s clearly very active imaginations to envisage how unpleasant it must be to finish one’s days kicking the air before an audience of grim-faced comrades, Bell moved swiftly on to what a simple job it was, and how, when the fearful chamber was reopened, he himself would willingly be the first man in.

  Here he smoothly moved into his third dialectic mode, by mocking a hypothetical bunch of wan cowards who could not bear the terrors of a shallow hole. The men grew quiet, and seemed shamed by the time he finished talking. He decided the time was right to shift from the oratorical to the practical.

  “We start now,” he said, hefting a spade. “I’m tired of excusing listless work to the governor. This time tomorrow, I want the foundation excavated and surveyed, ready for repair.”

  The men watched him start digging at the loose earth where the collapse had brought in the sides of the crater made by the exploded mine. The day was wearing on, and they knew the task would take them into darkness. Hensley told one of the lads to fetch brands for the evening, for they would surely need them. Then he gathered the other boys and set them to carrying earth in baskets to the spoil heap. Slowly and unwillingly, the men took up their tools and joined Bell.

  The work was slower than Bell anticipated. It wasn’t purely through the reluctance of his sappers, although there was certainly plenty of that. The hole itself was awkward to work in, and the soil kept shifting as they went, sometimes eradicating the last half hour of excavation. Bell presumed the newly discovered secondary chamber was the problem, but he still had not clapped eyes on the damnable hole, so it was all supposition. Certainly the digging did not go smoothly. More than once, he had a sense of the malevolence of inanimate objects when small setbacks dogged their way every other minute.

  The brands were lit, and work continued beneath a darkening sky late into the evening, the flickering light and stink of burning pitch being no strangers to men used to mining their way under enemy fortifications. It brought with it an association of hovering danger, however, and their low spirits sank further.

  Presently, they touched upon the supports they had themselves placed there during the earlier part of the repairs, and Bell knew they must be close on to where Archer had been caught by the accident. An accident he had deliberately caused, Bell reminded himself.

  Hensley cleared the men out so he could inspect the site more closely, and went down into the hole with a brand, one of the younger lads holding another behind him. He muttered and swore under his breath, and none could be sure if it was in dismay at the ruin of their work or at being in a dank pit at gone midnight.

  Bell squatted by the breach to observe their progress. There was little to be seen but the yellow light of the brands and the shadows they cast. Hensley and the boy were little more than silhouettes themselves, despite being barely three yards down. Bell squinted and wafted the fumes from the pitch torches away. His eyes watered and he blinked hard to clear them.

  “The earth is soft here,” called Hensley. “There’s a sink; I can see a wee valley in the soil where it’s drained dow…”

  A pause and the light moved sharply.

  “It’s subsiding, Major! Back, boy! Get out!”

  Bell saw the nearest silhouette resolve into the lad as he turned and crawled up the incline toward him. Behind, he could see the other brand clearly now, but Hensley himself was little more than a fragmented chiaroscuro of jagged moments.

  “Move yourself, lad! The floor is shifting!”

  Then Hensley’s light was gone with a growl of ruffled flame.

  Bell reached forward and grabbed the boy’s outstretched hand, pulling him clear to sprawl on the raw earth behind them. Bell’s attention was purely on the hole.

  “Hensley!” he bellowed into the void. “Answer me, if you’re able! Hensley!”

  There was no reply.

  Bell was not a man given to vacillation. He shrugged off his coat and snatched the torch from the boy’s shaking hand. Without a second’s further deliberation, he descended into the pit.

  Decisive was Major Bell, but not impetuous. He went slowly, testing the way with his heel as he went. In a moment he found himself at the edge of an open sinkhole, perhaps four feet across. Immediately he lowered himself onto his chest and lay prone at the hole’s perimeter, testing below the lip with his hand. It seemed solid enough, and that would have to do. If Hensley was buried in soil and unable to escape, every passing second would sour what breath remained in his lungs until it poisoned him.

  Bell crawled forward to look down into the void.

  “Hensley! Can you hear me, man?”

  Only silence.

  Bell looked back up the tunnel entrance. The man were milling around there, fearful and useless. The sight sparked fury in his breast.

  “God’s teeth, what a damned crowd of old wives you are!” he roared at them. “Rope and lanterns! A man’s life is in the balance! Green! Ryder! Owen! Ready yourselves! Boy!” He glared at Hensley’s torchbearer. “Come back here and bring that brand with you!”

  More afraid of the major than the dark hole, the lad quickly climbed down to join Bell.

  “Cast your light into the hole,” ordered Bell. “Throw it in.”

  The torch flared as it fell, and came to rest no more than a pike’s length beneath. In its uncertain light, Bell could make out stone walls, and a mound of earth directly below the breach. He narrowed his eyes and looked as far hither and thither as he might. This was no cellar, he concluded; it was a tunnel. An old, old tunnel. He had studied the city’s stonework enough to know the medieval style well, and even the Roman. This looked a great deal more like the work of the latter.

  “Where is that rope?” he demanded, and then without waiting for an answer, crabbed himself sideways over the edge of the hole, hung there awkwardly by his upper arms and then, trusting to providence more than good sense, he let himself fall.

  The stonework was ancient, but the floor was earthen, and the second thing Major Bell noted were the tracks.

  The first was that Hensley was missing.

  The earth mound was bedded on a layer of worked stone, the section of the tunnel’s arched ceiling t
hat must have been weakened by the breaching explosion and subsequently collapsed during the repair works. The soil had spread out and to Bell’s eye scarcely seemed deep enough to bury a child, never mind a full-grown sapper.

  By the time he was surveying the tunnel floor, a cry of “Heads below!” was halloed down, followed on the moment by a tail of rope. As Green descended, Bell called up to Owen: “Send my regards to Captain Harker and ask him to attend with a detachment of men. Make sure My Lord Fairfax is informed that we have discovered a tunnel here, one that has been used but recently. We are starting a search of it. When you’ve sent the messages, gather arms for we four, pistols if you can find them. My sword hangs by my coat.”

  While Ryder climbed down to join them, bringing Bell’s sword and a pair of crowbars as weapons for himself and Green, Bell examined the soil floor by the steadier light of an oil lantern. The tunnel hadn’t simply been used, he could see; it had been frequented. Tracks led back and forth, creating a slightly hardened path in the earth, a path disrupted by the collapse. The tracks milled around the untidy heap of soil and fallen stones.

  A flattening in the top of the pile showed where it had been struck by some weight: Hensley. It was plain to see where he had rolled down to the tunnel floor. The marks led southeasterly, in the general direction of the old Roman fort that had once stood more or less where the minster cathedral now loomed.

  “Major,” said Green from the far side of the heaped debris.

  Momentarily fearing the worst — perhaps he had missed Hensley’s body in his initial search — Bell joined Green. It struck him then: perhaps finding Hensley dead there wasn’t the worst eventuality. Perhaps the worst was what those damnable drag marks in the earth were suggesting to him.

  That suggestion only grew in strength when he saw Green’s discovery. A pitch brand, very deliberately extinguished by being thrust into the loose earth.

  Owen reappeared then at the lip of the hole above. “Major, Captain Harker is leading a patrol. I sent horse after him, but there’s no way to know when he’ll be fetched.”

  Bell snorted vexatiously. “And My Lord Fairfax?”

  “Has been informed, sir. I am waiting on his pleasure.”

  “I regret we have no time for his pleasure. Master Hensley is missing, and may have been taken by Royalist sympathizers. Have you the weapons, at least?”

  Owen brought down cavalry sabers with him, no pistols being found. Seeing his men there, filthy-faced with blades thrust into waistbands, Bell felt more like a pirate king than an officer of the Parliamentarian army.

  “Green, stay abreast of me, Owen at our backs, and Ryder to cover the rear. Steady pace.” He looked deep into the darkness of the tunnel ahead and ignored his misgivings. “Advance.”

  The small party moved off into the gloom of the ancient tunnel.

  Aspects of the tunnel’s geography confused Bell. In the first instance, the end of the tunnel behind them must, common sense said, be close, for otherwise the tunnel would wind into the river. Bell had surveyed the area carefully for weaknesses during the siege; he was as sure as the nose on his face that no tunnel opened into the river. At least, not at the surface. Perhaps in Roman times it had been more shallow?

  It also perplexed the major that a lengthy Roman tunnel had gone undiscovered. He was unclear how long ago the Romans had been in Britain, but they were in the Bible, so he guessed at somewhere around the first year AD. Since then, the Norse, the Saxons, and the Normans had left their mark on the city and raised many buildings. How had none of them ever found the tunnel?

  This was answered when Ryder pointed out some markings on the wall the others had missed as they passed. It was a strange, godless series of scratches into the stone, angular and alien. Bell had seen similar before, though.

  “That’s Norse. Seen suchlike up in Northumberland.”

  That answered Bell’s question, at least a little. Perhaps the tunnel entrance opened into the home of a family of Royalists, who used it secretly. In principle, Bell did not mind this hypothetical family. A civil war is a strange thing, with odd enmities and unexpected sympathies. But they had Hensley, and that meant the major’s mercy was paper thin. If they had harmed one of the men under his command, they would be punished. If they had killed him, Bell would string them up himself.

  He was steeling himself for such a judgment when the tunnel abruptly ended.

  The chamber was more than a shrine, but less than a temple, and Bell could not understand the purpose of it beyond it being a place of pagan worship. The tunnel opened into what he gauged to be the southwestern point of a circular chamber five or six yards across. The brickwork was Roman, and also the simple stone altar, he guessed. Probably some of the bones too.

  The sides of the chamber were stacked with human bones like an ossuary built by a madman. He’d heard the papists liked to make such things. The bones were old and untidy, ancient scraps of desiccated meat visible hanging from femurs and tibiae, humeri and radii. Scraps of cloth and even armor were visible here and there.

  Other discarded items lay in an untidy pile by the entrance. Helmets Roman and Norse, Norman bernies, and swords from Plantagenet times. Armed men had come here, and they had died.

  “Major,” said Green quietly, “mayhap we should go back? Wait for the captain?” His knuckles showed white on his sword’s hilt as he spoke.

  “Not yet,” murmured Bell. It was difficult to speak much above a whisper in that chamber. “We still don’t know what befell Hensley.”

  He saw Ryder glance at the skeletal remains and draw breath to say something before thinking better of it.

  “I’d do it for any of you,” said Bell. “We never leave a man behind while I have a say in it.”

  “He can’t have come this way, though,” said Owen. “There be no way out.”

  This was also true, or seemed to be true. The tunnel through which they had gained entrance was also the only egress. Yet the drag marks in the soil indicated this direction right enough. Bell frowned; the floor being slabs of stone, the dry dust upon them was not enough to hold sufficient indication of Hensley’s fate, lost among the comings and goings of whoever else used the place.

  “There’ll be a concealed door,” he said. “As the papists use to hide their plate and idols. Needs be we must find it.” He set the men to searching the chamber carefully by quarters. They set to the task diligently though poorly enthused.

  It was Bell himself who made the discovery, having given himself the quarter farthest from the entrance, to lead by example. The slab-sided altar was a far better prospect than the piles of bones, and Bell approached it cautiously.

  As he did so, he saw that he had been wrong about it being an altar at all. Its position upon a low dais and the shadows cast by the men’s lights had served to obscure the altar’s surface, until Bell grew close and realized that, in truth, it had no surface at all.

  He’d seen Roman coffins before. During the siege, they’d turned up a couple on the Mount, a low rise to the west of Micklegate Bar. It seemed the rich Romans of York had been buried in great slab-sided sarcophagi that — viewed from the side, in poor light — might well be mistaken for an altar. Those coffins had lids, also of stone. This one had none, and the suspicion wiggled in Bell’s mind that perhaps it had never had one.

  He climbed the two low steps formed by concentric ovals beneath the coffin and looked into it, holding his lantern high and away from him so that the light fell without shadow. The lack of ambiguity in what he saw made him wish he hadn’t been so assiduous with the light.

  Hensley lay there. Quite dead, and curled in a ball like a frightened child. It was not the dreadful wounds in throat, torso, and limbs that appalled Bell to the merest fraction, as much as the expression on the corpse’s face. Bell had seen enough of violent death on the battlefield for it to retain little ability to shock or horrify. This was something else again.

  Hensley’s eyes were open and rheumy already, the cloudy glassines
s of death settled on them with unnatural rapidity. They were wide open, as was the mouth, settled in a scream that never reached expression. Bell had been hard after Hensley from the moment he fell, and the distance from the breach to the chamber could not be more than two hundred and fifty or three hundred yards, at most, of silent, stone-lined tunnel. A shout would have been heard easily enough, never mind a scream.

  Hensley, then, had died rapidly, although not rapidly enough for Hensley. His very last quick second was struck upon his face, and would be until the worms took the flesh from him.

  And yet, he could not have died with such alacrity, for there was blood aplenty, and dead men do not bleed.

  They do not bleed, yet Hensley had bled a quart or more into the coffin, a tide of black that was creeping from beneath the cadaver as Bell watched.

  They do not bleed, yet Hensley was bleeding.

  An oath stronger than most escaped Bell’s lips and drew the attention of his men. “What is amiss, Major?” said Green as he reached Bell’s side. Then he looked into the coffin and had no words at all.

  The blood covered the floor of the coffin, and then began to fill it. Pints. Gallons. More than any man might contain. It rose around Hensley and submerged him in its tide, a darker shade of red than blood had any right to be.

  Green stepped away, and Bell wished he was able to do so too. But he could only stare as the coffin filled. The last he saw of Hensley’s face, he could have sworn the eye still above the rising meniscus rolled in its socket to regard Bell. The lips moved, the flood pouring smoothly into the open mouth, but Bell never understood what Hensley was trying to say, even if it had ever happened; Bell found many reasons to deny his memories afterward.

  Then the blood swallowed Hensley altogether. It rose until it was at the very edge of the coffin’s lip, and there it halted, as if by a spigot closing.